Motionless as an Idol - Columbus State University

Bullock 14appropriately, that voice has strong masculine overtones. An important distinctionbetween the texts analyzed in this project relates to the narrating voice. In "A Rose forEmily/' the narrator is male and speaks for the community as a whole, unlike the novelsin which different characters take turns narrating. This difference in voice also speaks tothe autonomy of the characters, allowing the speakers more authority than those who aremerely spoken of.The community voice, society, sees Miss Emily through a lens of art, and thatlens represents the cage in which Miss Emily is confined because art is not capable ofcreation; instead, art is completely subject to the will and intention of its artist andaudience. Miss Emily's society views her as an artistic creation, not an artist or a creator,and therefore, the community feels no qualms about imposing all of their history,traditions, beliefs, and social conventions upon her without considering her desire, or lackthereof, to meet their expectations. Early in the story, the town clearly describes the wayin which they perceive Miss Emily: "Alive Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and acare; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town," (Faulkner 74). The townspeople seeher as a "tableau," an "idol," and an "anger in a stained glass church window (Faulkner76, 77). All of the art metaphors they create for Miss Emily fulfill that initial description,each relating directly to the sense of duty and obligation.The clearest example of the townspeople's conceptualization of Miss Emily as artis the way in which they describe her with her father in the setting of the tableau. Atableau is commonly thought of as a picture, but it can also be the posing of a picture,such as a portrait. The following describes what is imagined as a family portrait from theperspective of the townspeople: